Andrle and I each used to have our own Netflix accounts. For a time, after we got married, we kept both; mine was used for disc rentals, and hers for streaming. Eventually we realized we were mostly just streaming, so we canceled my account and went to a single shared account. Sadly, this meant I lost over 1400 movie ratings, since Netflix provides no official way to export. After a while, I gave up on ever getting my ratings back.
Finally, earlier this month, Netflix embraced their role as a household service and added profiles. I decided to pay for a month of streaming and reactivate my old account to see if I could get my ratings out. I found this browser script which, after applying a patch described there, gave me a JSON file containing all of my ratings. This is also a useful backup to have in case Netflix ever goes away (unlikely).
Unfortunately there is still no way to easily import ratings into Netflix, so I wrote a very basic Chrome extension that would read the exported JSON file and click through each movie, rating it. It’s available on GitHub. Make sure to read the instructions included with the code; it’s straightforward but requires some poweruser comfort to follow the steps, since I didn’t bother with an interface. (Incidentally, this is one thing I love about having programming skills – that sense of having more power and control over my own data.)
Obviously it would be nice if various online services practiced across-the-board data liberation (though with Facebook and Twitter adding export, it’s getting better), but hopefully this is one tiny step in helping other nerdy family units transfer their precious Netflix ratings.
